Using Metrics to Measure the Implementation of Agile in the Enterprise – ITG Case Study

Session Abstract:

Investment Technology Group (ITG) is the advanced stages of implementing an enterprise-wide Agile migration program, and wants to be able to monitor our implementation, both for the teams’ own benefit and for enterprise-wide governance of the migration.

As early as 2002, ITG has piloted the use of Agile for software projects. About two years ago, ITG decided to migrate all of its software development operation to a standard Agile process baseline, based on a mix of XP, Scrum and Lean practices. As part this migration, teams are starting to use Rally’s Agile Lifecycle Management platform. Having a critical mass of projects in Rally. We have started collecting from Rally a set of metrics which provides executives a quantitative insight into the progression of our agile implementation, and can be used by teams to continuously improve as part of their retrospection process. ITG has implemented a fairly comprehensive set of metrics, and plans to implement more based on teams input. These metrics are fairly generic in nature and can probably be useful to others as well.

Lecturer’s short Bio:

Sagi Smolarski is a Director, Software Development at Investment Technology Group, leads the global initiative to implement agile, and is part of the team that creates ITG’s next-generation enterprise infrastructure.

Sagi has been leading projects and development teams and has previously headed the development of ITG’s flagship Execution Management system – Triton, developed by ITG’s first team to implement an Agile process (XP).

Sagi lectures at Ben Gurion University on Advanced Methods in Information Systems Engineering, a course that focuses on the Design, Architecture, and Methodologies used to implement software systems, with a special emphasis on Agile methods. Sagi has been teaching Python at the High Tech academy. Sagi holds a BA in Physics from Technion IIT and a BSc in Materials Engineering from the same institution.

NOTE: Today Sagi is a Partner, SPC, Lead Coach @ AgileSparks